This Abandoned New York City Island Shows What Would Happen 50 Years After Humans

Imagine that one
of New York City's many islands became abandoned, and you
came back to see what it looked like 50 years later. It’s hard to
visualize. However, the place would likely be overgrown with
vegetation, and the buildings would be crumbling.

This is exactly what happened when photographer Christopher Payne
visited
North Brother Island, a 13-acre island between the Bronx and
Riker’s Island that's been abandoned since 1963. After it became
inhabited in 1885, North Brother housed a hospital to quarantine
victims of contagious disease and later provided housing to World
War II veterans. It also held a treatment center for teenage drug
addicts.

At its peak, the island had the look of a manicured college
campus, full of green spaces, sidewalks, roads, well-kept
buildings, street lamps, and fire hydrants. Visit now, Payne
says, and you’ll see an island that nature has reclaimed.

“I went there hoping to find the buildings completely
intact, full of old artifacts just the way people left them, but
what I found was ruins,” Payne told Business Insider. “It looked
like it had been abandoned for a century.”

North Brother Island has been virtually undisturbed by
trespassers and left to decay naturally. This is due to the
island's natural isolation and its lack of a working dock for
boats to land on. In the 1970s, many Bronx kids partied on the
island. But after a number of boats capsized in Hell Gate, the
surrounding body of water, the city stepped up patrols. People
left the island alone after that.

You can only get to North Brother by taking a small boat that
lands directly on the shore. Payne got permission to visit
the island by promising to ferry New York City Parks Department
employees — who manage the island — to North Brother so that they
could carry out various maintenance tasks.

Since it was abandoned in the 1960s, the island has become a
nature reserve. New York City is located directly on bird
migration routes both north and south and, as one of the few
remaining green spots near the city, it has become a natural
stopping place for the birds. Nobody can visit from March to
September, and only a few guests are allowed on the rest of the
year.

The island's longest-running function was as a quarantine
facility, so most of the buildings are of a medical nature. This
is the Nurses' building, where the island's resident nurses
lived. The island famously housed "Typhoid Mary"
Mallon, the first carrier in the United States of Typhoid
fever.

When Payne visited, he expected to find the interior of the
buildings mostly intact and filled with artifacts. However, he
found that almost everything had been cleared out of the
buildings. This classroom in the male dormitory was one of the
few rooms that had anything still in it. The books are mostly
cast-offs from the Queens Public Library.

The largest structure is the Tuberculosis Pavilion, the lobby of
which is shown here. Payne says the pavilion is the only building
that could be saved structurally if the city wanted to restore
the island. While in operation, the pavilion housed a fully
functional medical facility, complete with x-ray machines.

This is the balcony of the Tuberculosis Pavilion. Payne usually
visited the island in either September or late November because
it lags seasonally behind the rest of the Northeast. In
September, the island is still overflowing with greenery and, in
November and December, the leaves are still changing colors.

One of the most striking aspects of the island is how it changes
throughout the year, Payne says. In summer, nature consumes the
buildings. In winter, it all recedes and the island becomes
barren. Payne took this photo of the coal house from the roof of
the morgue in September.

This is a view of the boiler plant, also taken from the morgue
roof. While it's hard to imagine, Payne says that all of the
nature sits over a thin layer of dirt. Below it, one can still
find the sidewalks, street lamps, fire hydrants, and streets that
used to define the island.

North Brother Island was more or less self-sufficient when it was
in operation. It had an industrial plant and a coal house to
provide utilities to the buildings and an internal telephone
system. This is the collapsing roof of the boiler plant, which
provided heat to the island.

Nature has demolished most of the island's buildings, like this
church. "At the rate they are going, the buildings are going to
disappear," says Payne, who is also trained as an architect.
"Most of the buildings are so far gone it would be difficult to
salvage them."

Payne says he learned this lesson from his many trips to the
island: "When people leave, man-made structures break down
and get replaced quickly by the natural order. No matter how hard
we try, nature will always reassert itself."